admin | August 26, 2010
At 2:22 p.m. on Aug. 26, 1862, C.W. Spillman, horse thief, became the first man executed in what’s now Montana. Spillman was strung up from a tree near Gold Creek, which appeared on maps as Hangtown for years after. James Stuart, one of the town’s founders, described Spillman as “a rather quiet reserved pleasant young [...]
admin | December 8, 2009
We’re in the early stages of the 150th anniversary of construction of the Mullan Road (see story in Missoulian, Dec. 5) and if you’re like me you get to wondering what it was like around here in 1859-60. George Weisel’s trusty “Men and Trade on the Northwest Frontier,” a remarkable study based on the ledger [...]
admin | April 30, 2009
(Click on title to comment) One of the items I just finished working on for this Sunday’s Montana History Almanac for the Territory section of the Missoulian talks about Montana’s first organized sluice mining on Gold Creek in May 1862. The Stuart brothers, Granville and James, were involved. So were Jim Minesinger and one Thomas [...]
admin | March 24, 2009
We’ve all heard about how the railroads changed the namescape of the country they passed through, assigning names to each station. Here’s an excerpt from a hard-to-read railroad column in the Weekly Missoulian in 1883, as the main line of the Northern Pacific was being completed in Montana: “The man who deals out names to [...]
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